Year versioning is not a very good idea, because you can't tell whether two versions are very different or only slightly different. All you know is when they were released - and even that is often wrong (eg Win2k released in 1999).
For example, going by the year versioning, which is the bigger jump:
Win95 -> Win98 Win98 -> Win2000
Of course, it must be Win98 -> Win2000, since there's only two years difference! (No pedants please). If they'd called the versions by their proper names, 'Windows 4.0', 'Windows 4.1' and 'Windows NT 5.0', you could see what was going on.
I think that the business model patents are in the form of software patents. You can't get a patent on the priceline.com 'name your price' model, but write a computer program to do it and voila!
This is another reason why software patents are a very bad idea. More and more of everyday life is automated using software; if we allow patents on software, then any everyday process or business model can effectively be patented.
I think he judged 'Slashdot readers' based on averaging all the comments that appear here. It is clear that 'Joe Slashdotter' tends to have well-defined views on certain subjects. Yours may differ of course.
I don't think people are patenting the genes themselves - what they are doing is looking at what the gene does, and then rushing out and getting a huge wodge of patents for possible uses - 'use of gene X434 to treat cancer' and so on.
I think the answer to this is to not allow speculative patents, which more are like weeing on a patch of ground to claim it than like a positive contribution to knowledge. Unless you can actually show a treatment, and argue convincingly that it would not be obvious to anyone else with knowledge of the gene sequence, you should not get a patent. (IMHO; I am neither a geneticist nor a lawyer.)
It's true, there are some genuinely difficult ideas which take a lot of research to come up with, and might arguably be suitable for patenting. However, IMHO we still shouldn't have patents for any software.
The overall effect of software patents is so bad that we will just have to grit our teeth and exclude all software from patenting. There is no easy way to distinguish a 'worthwhile' patent from a useless or obstructive one - certainly I don't think the USPTO could ever manage it, and it could get very hairy in court.
But fundamentally, I'm not sure that patents are necessary for software - we have to ask, would these algorithms be developed anyway? Companies like IBM say that without getting a patent monopoly, they would not - but 50 years of computer history shows otherwise.
Have you actually done this? I know there is a GTK port to Windows (and a port of the GIMP) but I've never seen a GNOME application running on Win32, with or without Cygwin.
Only Innovator of the Year? These days I would have expected him to get Innovator of the Millennium (okay, maybe he'd be pipped to the post by Britney Spears or something).
Yes, the real villains here are not Google (who may just be trying to defend themselves, we'll have to wait and see), but those who grant such patents in the first place.
In the US, this seems to be mainly down to the incompetence of the USPTO, who clearly have a vested interest in expanding the scope of what is patentable. Elsewhere in the world, it is made clear that software is not patentable. Copyright makes sense for software, patents do not.
But there are some who are lobbying to spread the US software patent system throughout the world. In particular, they seek to introduce software patents in the European Union. You can check out freepatents.org to find out more about the fight to stop this happening.
Yes, icewm has worked very well for me. I have been using various beta versions for a while now and they have been rock solid.
I'd recommend anyone to try icewm if you want a window manager that doesn't have too much clutter such as animations, but gets the job done. The default config is very usable (a Win95-type taskbar interface), but personally I have stripped it down further, to get the most minimal interface possible while still being able to do things without obscure hotkeys.
Another interesting thing is that it's in C++ (IIRC), so it might be fun to look at if you want an alternative perspective on how to write a window manager.
IANAL, but I think it might have something to do with the intended use of the 'product', what it is sold for.
If you buy a car, the intended use is to drive it on roads. Thus you have cause to sue if the brakes stop working or the wheels fall off. If you decided instead to use it as a foodstuff, you couldn't sue claiming injury because of indigestion. It's your own fault for using it for a purpose it wasn't designed for.
You can apply this to software too. If you bought a web browser and found that it wouldn't display web pages (and you could prove that this was the browser's fault, and not badly-behaved site, broken networking or whatever else), you would have a legitimate grievance. (Although IMHO the most you should be entitled to is a refund of what you paid, unless you have agreed different warranty terms in advance.)
However, if you used the browser for a mission-critical information display, in a hospital or whatever, you wouldn't have a legitimate complaint if memory leaks caused it to crash after two weeks of use. A browser is not designed to give that kind of reliability, and it doesn't claim to. (Some things such as Java explicitly say that 'X is not designed for use in safety critical applications'.)
So I think that you have to ask: is the user just being stupid by trying to use the software for something inappropriate?
One thing I'd like to see is an instant messaging client that converts messages into email and sends them to you. Then I could just check my inbox rather than inbox plus several messaging programs. Coping with outgoing messages would be more complex, but probably the Reply-To: address on the message would be something like 'icq-4929392@localhost', which the client could then pass on to ICQ.
The beauty of this is that you don't have to write yet another messaging client, even a grand unified one. You just need one wrapper for each protocol, to convert it to and from mail. There wouldn't be any noticeable speed loss, since the mail is being sent locally and outgoing messages are converted into ICQ (or whatever).
(Although I've never seen the point of instant messaging anyway, email seems easily instant enough to me.)
Don't flirt in a certain manner--it causes the sensors to think you're a rapist. Don't laugh too loud while raising your hands--the sensors might think you have a gun.
Who cares what the sensors think? They can think what they like as far as I am concerned. You can't be sent to jail on the grounds that the computer thought you looked a bit shifty. The only cause to worry would be if people started being arrested and charged for 'acting in a suspicious manner'. No amount of technology could bring that about, it would require changes in the law.
If you go to a public place and start acting in a strange manner, it's only natural that other people or police might become suspicious. They might be ready to intervene if it looked like there was a danger to others, or if you started to commit a crime. I don't see how this is any differemt, it just automates the process.
I think that some people consider the Artistic License to be ambiguous and possibly not as watertight as the GPL or XFree86 licences. What is a bug fix, for example?
Also, rightly or wrongly, it suffers from being YAL and it's a good idea to choose the XFree86, LGPL or GPL licences instead, to let other free programs reuse your code. (Dual-licensing, as with perl, solves this problem.)
IMHO, all the fuss the AL makes about non-standard executables having non-standard names is unnecessary - it's unlikely there would be a conspiracy to replace your program with a different version without telling anyone. The requirement of the GPL to make it clear when code is modified, or Apache's requirement that you can't call your version 'Apache', seem like a better way to do things.
One thing that pisses me off with Corolla is that the TV advertisements pronounce it 'Corole-a' with a long O, when the spelling clearly indicates otherwise. Likewise 'Harkonnen' in Dune.
I am not a lawyer, but I thought that the author of a work has the right to be identified as the author. Unlike other copyright powers, this cannot be assigned or given up - it is an inalienable right. That's why books say 'All rights reserved.' but also 'The moral right of the author has been asserted.'.
(This is for the UK, I think - I don't know how it works in other countries.)
Would this mean that software companies are obliged to give credit to people who wrote code, and that any contract signing away this right is not valid?
The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland", but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
Having several 'modes' slows you down
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 2
So pressing a single key ('j', for example) in an editor is faster than a chorded combination like, oh, I don't know, CTRL-n? Not necessarily. How should you distinguish between 'j' to perform the special action, and 'j' to insert that letter?
If you introduce the concept of different modes, you need to switch between modes, and that has to require an extra keypress. In vi you must press ESC once before moving, and once after - that's three keystrokes instead of one. Those extra ESCs are a constant whether you move by one character or fifty, so it's arguable that for large movements the two-modes version is indeed better. But if you just want to move down a line, it's a lot more hassle.
It seems to me that if you shut down other people's web sites, you automatically become the bad guy. Whether you are in the right or not, if you go around harassing others who are trying to distribute information (whether by lawsuits, or by cracking their server), you come out looking like the guilty party.
Judges in Britain are predominantly white, male, small-c conservative, etc. A lot of them are Freemasons and/or go hunting. Do you seriously think they are likely to treat fairly a black woman accused of violence at an anti-hunting demo? I think not!
Yes, we all know that a white judge will automatically be biased against black defendants. And of course, it's no good having male judges, as they will always have a deep-seated hatred of women. And while we're at it, let's have religious quotas for the judiciary, as trials will never be fair if the judge and defendant have different beliefs. Perhaps we could filter on political views (like hunting) as well.
If you want to say that white, male judges will automatically be racist and sexist, come out and say it. I fail to see how the colour of a judge's skin makes any difference, nor the judge's sex. If you are alleging that there is some conspiracy to appoint only members of a select group to the judiciary, let's see some evidence.
3. The attack on the right to silence comes from the Criminal Justice Act, which was passed by the last Conservative Government. In effect, it says that if you choose to rely in court on information which you refused (as in, were asked, but refused) to speak to the police about, they can mention this fact. Any infringement of liberty is bad, but this one is quite mild.
I don't see how it is an infringement of liberty at all - all it says, AFAIK, is that the jury can take into account the fact that you didn't mention something before the trial. In other words, if you act like you have something to hide, the jury is allowed to consider that fact when deciding if you're guilty or not. You still have every right to remain silent.
If somebody could explain to me how this results in wrongful convictions, or reduces freedom, then I will change my views - but from where I'm sitting it just looks like common sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Year versioning is not a very good idea, because you can't tell whether two versions are very different or only slightly different. All you know is when they were released - and even that is often wrong (eg Win2k released in 1999).
For example, going by the year versioning, which is the bigger jump:
Win95 -> Win98
Win98 -> Win2000
Of course, it must be Win98 -> Win2000, since there's only two years difference! (No pedants please). If they'd called the versions by their proper names, 'Windows 4.0', 'Windows 4.1' and 'Windows NT 5.0', you could see what was going on.
I think the 'Slackware 96' name was just a one-off as another name for Slackware 3.1.
I think that the business model patents are in the form of software patents. You can't get a patent on the priceline.com 'name your price' model, but write a computer program to do it and voila!
This is another reason why software patents are a very bad idea. More and more of everyday life is automated using software; if we allow patents on software, then any everyday process or business model can effectively be patented.
I think he judged 'Slashdot readers' based on averaging all the comments that appear here. It is clear that 'Joe Slashdotter' tends to have well-defined views on certain subjects. Yours may differ of course.
I don't think people are patenting the genes themselves - what they are doing is looking at what the gene does, and then rushing out and getting a huge wodge of patents for possible uses - 'use of gene X434 to treat cancer' and so on.
I think the answer to this is to not allow speculative patents, which more are like weeing on a patch of ground to claim it than like a positive contribution to knowledge. Unless you can actually show a treatment, and argue convincingly that it would not be obvious to anyone else with knowledge of the gene sequence, you should not get a patent. (IMHO; I am neither a geneticist nor a lawyer.)
It's true, there are some genuinely difficult ideas which take a lot of research to come up with, and might arguably be suitable for patenting. However, IMHO we still shouldn't have patents for any software.
The overall effect of software patents is so bad that we will just have to grit our teeth and exclude all software from patenting. There is no easy way to distinguish a 'worthwhile' patent from a useless or obstructive one - certainly I don't think the USPTO could ever manage it, and it could get very hairy in court.
But fundamentally, I'm not sure that patents are necessary for software - we have to ask, would these algorithms be developed anyway? Companies like IBM say that without getting a patent monopoly, they would not - but 50 years of computer history shows otherwise.
I only read Playboy for the source code listings.
Have you actually done this? I know there is a GTK port to Windows (and a port of the GIMP) but I've never seen a GNOME application running on Win32, with or without Cygwin.
Only Innovator of the Year? These days I would have expected him to get Innovator of the Millennium (okay, maybe he'd be pipped to the post by Britney Spears or something).
Yes, the real villains here are not Google (who may just be trying to defend themselves, we'll have to wait and see), but those who grant such patents in the first place.
In the US, this seems to be mainly down to the incompetence of the USPTO, who clearly have a vested interest in expanding the scope of what is patentable. Elsewhere in the world, it is made clear that software is not patentable. Copyright makes sense for software, patents do not.
But there are some who are lobbying to spread the US software patent system throughout the world. In particular, they seek to introduce software patents in the European Union. You can check out freepatents.org to find out more about the fight to stop this happening.
Yes, icewm has worked very well for me. I have been using various beta versions for a while now and they have been rock solid.
I'd recommend anyone to try icewm if you want a window manager that doesn't have too much clutter such as animations, but gets the job done. The default config is very usable (a Win95-type taskbar interface), but personally I have stripped it down further, to get the most minimal interface possible while still being able to do things without obscure hotkeys.
Another interesting thing is that it's in C++ (IIRC), so it might be fun to look at if you want an alternative perspective on how to write a window manager.
IANAL, but I think it might have something to do with the intended use of the 'product', what it is sold for.
If you buy a car, the intended use is to drive it on roads. Thus you have cause to sue if the brakes stop working or the wheels fall off. If you decided instead to use it as a foodstuff, you couldn't sue claiming injury because of indigestion. It's your own fault for using it for
a purpose it wasn't designed for.
You can apply this to software too. If you bought a web browser and found that it wouldn't display web pages (and you could prove that this was the browser's fault, and not badly-behaved site, broken networking or whatever else), you would have a legitimate grievance. (Although IMHO the most you should be entitled to is a refund of what you paid, unless you have agreed different warranty terms in advance.)
However, if you used the browser for a mission-critical information display, in a hospital or whatever, you wouldn't have a legitimate complaint if memory leaks caused it to crash after two weeks of use. A browser is not designed to give that kind of reliability, and it doesn't claim to. (Some things such as Java explicitly say that 'X is not designed for use in safety critical applications'.)
So I think that you have to ask: is the user just being stupid by trying to use the software for something inappropriate?
One thing I'd like to see is an instant messaging client that converts messages into email and sends them to you. Then I could just check my inbox rather than inbox plus several messaging programs. Coping with outgoing messages would be more complex, but probably the Reply-To: address on the message would be something like 'icq-4929392@localhost', which the client could then pass on to ICQ.
The beauty of this is that you don't have to write yet another messaging client, even a grand unified one. You just need one wrapper for each protocol, to convert it to and from mail. There wouldn't be any noticeable speed loss, since the mail is being sent locally and outgoing messages are converted into ICQ (or whatever).
(Although I've never seen the point of instant messaging anyway, email seems easily instant enough to me.)
Who cares what the sensors think? They can think what they like as far as I am concerned. You can't be sent to jail on the grounds that the computer thought you looked a bit shifty. The only cause to worry would be if people started being arrested and charged for 'acting in a suspicious manner'. No amount of technology could bring that about, it would require changes in the law.
If you go to a public place and start acting in a strange manner, it's only natural that other people or police might become suspicious. They might be ready to intervene if it looked like there was a danger to others, or if you started to commit a crime. I don't see how this is any differemt, it just automates the process.
I think that some people consider the Artistic License to be ambiguous and possibly not as watertight as the GPL or XFree86 licences. What is a bug fix, for example?
Also, rightly or wrongly, it suffers from being YAL and it's a good idea to choose the XFree86, LGPL or GPL licences instead, to let other free programs reuse your code. (Dual-licensing, as with perl, solves this problem.)
IMHO, all the fuss the AL makes about non-standard executables having non-standard names is unnecessary - it's unlikely there would be a conspiracy to replace your program with a different version without telling anyone. The requirement of the GPL to make it clear when code is modified, or Apache's requirement that you can't call your version 'Apache', seem like a better way to do things.
Fiat have made cars called the Cinquecento and the Seicento, which just mean 500 and 600 in Italian.
One thing that pisses me off with Corolla is that the TV advertisements pronounce it 'Corole-a' with a long O, when the spelling clearly indicates otherwise. Likewise 'Harkonnen' in Dune.
There is a site and mailing list trying to prevent the introduction of patents on software and business models in the European Union: freepatents.org.
I am not a lawyer, but I thought that the author of a work has the right to be identified as the author. Unlike other copyright powers, this cannot be assigned or given up - it is an inalienable right. That's why books say 'All rights reserved.' but also 'The moral right of the author has been asserted.'.
(This is for the UK, I think - I don't know how it works in other countries.)
Would this mean that software companies are obliged to give credit to people who wrote code, and that any contract signing away this right is not valid?
Not my page... interesting mistake, though.
So pressing a single key ('j', for example) in an editor is faster than a chorded combination like, oh, I don't know, CTRL-n? Not necessarily. How should you distinguish between 'j' to perform the special action, and 'j' to insert that letter?
If you introduce the concept of different modes, you need to switch between modes, and that has to require an extra keypress. In vi you must press ESC once before moving, and once after - that's three keystrokes instead of one. Those extra ESCs are a constant whether you move by one character or fifty, so it's arguable that for large movements the two-modes version is indeed better. But if you just want to move down a line, it's a lot more hassle.
It seems to me that if you shut down other people's web sites, you automatically become the bad guy. Whether you are in the right or not, if you go around harassing others who are trying to distribute information (whether by lawsuits, or by cracking their server), you come out looking like the guilty party.
Yes, we all know that a white judge will automatically be biased against black defendants. And of course, it's no good having male judges, as they will always have a deep-seated hatred of women. And while we're at it, let's have religious quotas for the judiciary, as trials will never be fair if the judge and defendant have different beliefs. Perhaps we could filter on political views (like hunting) as well.
If you want to say that white, male judges will automatically be racist and sexist, come out and say it. I fail to see how the colour of a judge's skin makes any difference, nor the judge's sex. If you are alleging that there is some conspiracy to appoint only members of a select group to the judiciary, let's see some evidence.
I don't see how it is an infringement of liberty at all - all it says, AFAIK, is that the jury can take into account the fact that you didn't mention something before the trial. In other words, if you act like you have something to hide, the jury is allowed to consider that fact when deciding if you're guilty or not. You still have every right to remain silent.
If somebody could explain to me how this results in wrongful convictions, or reduces freedom, then I will change my views - but from where I'm sitting it just looks like common sense.